In Japan, a 900 Gigabyte Upload Cap, Downloads Uncapped 368
Raindeer writes "While the Broadband Bandits of the US are contemplating bandwidth caps between 5 gigabyte and 40 gigabyte per month, the largest telco in Japan has gone ahead and laid down some heavy caps for Japan's broadband addicts. From now on, if you upload more than 30 gigabyte per day, your network connection may be disconnected. Just think of it ... if you're in Japan and want to upload the HD movie you shot of yesterday's wedding, you soon might hit the limit. The downloaders do not face similar problems."
Bandwidth cap? Not here (Score:3, Informative)
No such thing in Finland. I can upload and download 24/7 without any restrictions, and I've never heard of any ISP enforcing a cap.
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Agreed, Finland is a great country for file-sharing.
Yeah, if you forget about Lex Karpela, the local implementation of Euro-DMCA. And the Finreactor case [wikipedia.org].
Re:Bandwidth cap? Not here (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, of course: you can get broadband from any ISP you want, no matter who owns the phone line, so there's no monopoly problems like in the US.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
The thing is, the ISPs make next to nothing on the leased lines. I'd bet that if you just call them once per month (question about a bill, complaint about speed or packet loss, other errors), those subscribers are producing red numbers.
Of course, I don't know if the market is similar in Finland.
Disclaimer: I have worked for one of the largest Danish ISPs, specifically with DSL.
Re:Bandwidth cap? Not here (Score:5, Interesting)
The customer can then sign up with whichever ISP they want.
In some countries (such as the UK) the ISPs are also guaranteed access at "cost plus" basis to the local exchanges, so that some ISPs actually offer faster DSL connections than the company that owns the lines (BT, who owns the lines in the UK offer max 8Mbps for example, while many ISPs offer 24Mbps DSL by placing their own equipment in the exchanges).
It's what sane government regulation gets you.
Re:Bandwidth cap? Not here (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah, but you don't see the dark side of what that regulation gets you - universal healthcare, decent public transportation (compared to most of the US), lots of vacation time. Your wealthy people probably don't get anything like the tax cuts ours do. Practically the third world, that.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Yeah, but you don't see the dark side of what that regulation gets you - universal healthcare, decent public transportation (compared to most of the US), lots of vacation time. Your wealthy people probably don't get anything like the tax cuts ours do. Practically the third world, that.
It's exactly 60 years since the National Health Service was started in the UK (1948-07-05), there was a documentary on how it happened this evening. I'm young, and have always taken it for granted; I only started thinking about it when I read posts from Americans debating it on here a year or two ago. A few of the arguments against are similar to the ones from the 40s.
I admire the people of any country that cares for all their people, without cost to the individual [at the point of use, obviously taxes are
How? (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Trust me, those that attended don't want to see the footage.
There is no need for this for ordinary users (Score:4, Insightful)
Thats an insane amount. I can't even vaguely imagine how I would use more than 30 gig a month downloads. And 90% of that is me using the BBC iplayer because I don't own a video player or DVD recorder. Without those, it's probably under 5 gig a month tops, and thats mostly web surfing, the odd youtube vid and multiplayer gaming.
Fuck it, with so many 'triple A' games abandoning the PC, there aren't even any stupidly big demos to download anymore.
Unless you are some kid who thinks he is 'sticking it to the man' by downloading every single hollywood movie in HD (presumably so can watch it whilst snorting about how much it sucks and that the producers business model is flawed) from dodgy torrent sites, I don't see how anyone has any serious need for this.
I'm sure some smug slashdotters will equate this to the 640k quote, but tell me exactly how my need for digital data downloaded to my PC is going to go much higher in the next ten years?
Re:There is no need for this for ordinary users (Score:5, Funny)
Youtube in HD.
You lose.
Re:There is no need for this for ordinary users (Score:4, Informative)
But even if someone watches youtube for more than 4 hours in a row it wouldn't matter, because TFA mentions that it only affects upload, so one would have to upload 2.8 movies of average length a day.
BTW: Bluray supports MPEG-2 exactly for the reason that it wastes so much space. Otherwise people would start to wonder why we need 50 GB optical discs for HD videos...
Re:There is no need for this for ordinary users (Score:4, Informative)
I probably use about ~40gb a month, which I believe is below COX's limit of 60gb/month. I have a decent torrent ratio so I'm probably uploading 20gb a month as well
~5gb movies streamed from 360
~3gb movies streamed from netflix. I have no idea what the netflix size-per-movie is, but my wife watches about 5 of them per month.
~30gb porn
~10gb tv shows
~2gb checking email, web surfing, youtube, downloading linux distros, etc.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
~30gb porn
Good god man. You should switch to hentai, its easier to compress.
Re: (Score:3)
Tell me anything about technology in the next 10 years. It is you that is being smug. Your argument boils down to, I don't want bandwidth why should anyone else.
There it is smug emissions. Fuck you.
Re:There is no need for this for ordinary users (Score:5, Interesting)
The.X-Files.COMPLETE.MULTiSUBS.PAL.DVDR-MULTiGRP 253.91GB
Sure, downloading that is against the law in most countries, but if the bandwidth was there, the legal services providing similar products would come.
Unless you are some kid who thinks he is 'sticking it to the man' by downloading every single hollywood movie in HD
spider-man.3.wvc1.1080p.bluray.nlsubs.rabomil.wmv 13GB
That would make 2-3 hollywood movies per month I guess then.
And the rest of your comment shows that you have no idea of who pirates. Sure, the 15-29 group is overrepresented, but that has more to do with the fact that they are more savage with computers and the internet, and not with their age or political agenda. (Ah well, that they are more savage with computers and the internet does have to do with their age statistically)
from dodgy torrent sites
Dodgy torrent sites? I admit that I am careful when download applications via bittorrent. On the other hand, I am equally careful when downloading it from any other site, because the malware industry is huge. Trust is the only thing you have to go on due to crappy operating systems (and this is not limited to windows) that don't automatically install all applications in a sandbox. If I wanted an application to write to any files (including my data files) outside of its own configuration/program directory I would want to give it specific permission to do so. Of course, selecting a file in an operating system open/save file dialog should count as giving permission.
Ok, that got a little off topic, so let's get back to it.
I'm sure some smug slashdotters will equate this to the 640k quote, but tell me exactly how my need for digital data downloaded to my PC is going to go much higher in the next ten years?
It probably won't be. The majority of the old generation always stays with what the already have. Frontrunners in technology is and will always be young people, With a few older here and there.
Re:There is no need for this for ordinary users (Score:5, Insightful)
When all I had were floppy disks, my first 5MB hard disk seemed so huge that I started wondering how I would fill it. Question was answered within weeks. Few years later I spent seveal thousands of dollars for a monstruous 5GB hard disk, assuming that would be the end of all my storage troubles.
Nowadays, in my medical practice, my backup volume is at present 25 GB. It grows by about 1GB per month. That is what I have to transfer every night to an offsite backup facility.
Images I receive from radiology can be several GB a day when they transfer MRI and CT images, and so forth
Plus, once you got the bandwidth, you can start doing some real video conferencing at a frame rate and resolution that actually makes it usable - and you will burn through many GB in no time.
Re: (Score:2)
Don't suppose you've ever heard of advanced technologies like differential or incremental backups. Or if those are out of your reach, rsync would work well provided the mentioned backups are not encrypted.
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
You clearly don't have a internet porn addiction
30 gigs up is way more than I could ever send. (Score:5, Interesting)
I have a 10megabit down, 1.5megabit up at home. This means it would take me 44 hours to upload 30 gigabytes with my 1.5mb/s upload speed.
Perhaps until the backbone in Japan is updated to uncap upload speeds, the right answer would be to throttle bit rates for anyone who has uploaded more than 20 gigabytes in a particular month? You could almost do it by just slowly ramping down rather than cutting people off--and it's a lot less antisocial than just pulling the customer's plug.
Hell, I have an effective 20gigabyte/month upload cap because that's the maximum capacity of my bandwidth; yet until I heard about Japan's bandwidth I wasn't complaining.
As a footnote, the quote of the day at the bottom of my page reads: "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes. -- Dr. Warren Jackson, Director, UTCS"
Seems appropriate somehow...
Re:30 gigs up is way more than I could ever send. (Score:5, Insightful)
That's pretty well just what I was going to post, my upload bandwidth is a tad under 100KB/s, so the most I can upload in a 24 hour period is 8GB. My download bandwidth comes in at about 500KB/s so with that I could get to 40GB down per day.
After working in a university for 15 years and regularly getting 1-10MB/s and now working in private industry where we employ Infiniband, Gige and 10Gige these limits are horrifyingly slow to me.
Fibre to the home. Now!
Re: (Score:2)
This means it would take me 44 hours to upload 30 gigabytes with my 1.5mb/s upload speed.
...
Hell, I have an effective 20gigabyte/month upload cap because that's the maximum capacity of my bandwidth
Huh??
Re: (Score:2)
s/month/day/
I feel so sorry for the Japanese (Score:5, Funny)
That clearly shows how bad their Internet infrastructure is compared to the US, where we have *unlimited* accounts!
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
No kidding. I have Comcast and I've downloaded 30 GB just tod [NO CARRIER]
And what's about the third world. (Score:2, Informative)
900 GB cap is unacceptable in my opinion. (Score:3, Funny)
Wish we had that kind of cap (Score:2)
Luck in TN (Score:2)
What is "suck luck" and why do Tennesseans want it?
calculation time (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
In many asian countries, multi-douzen megabit connections for the equivalent of 30$ a month is the norm (and thats based on several years old info, I didn't check recently, so its probably even more).
Japan's population density is a LOT higher than the US, so having fiber in every house is quite simple to do.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, according to data from 2007, tokyo's population density was of 4700 person per square km, vs 2050 for new york. Los Angele, the closest USA city on the list stands at about 2700. Nowhere close. Plus, if you go by population density of the country (since federal governments have a hand in pushing these things along), the US have an insignificant population density, while in Japan you'd have to cater to less total surface. Big difference.
Thank god (Score:2)
No more hand held, blurry, shaky, home movies of yesterday's wedding.
a wedding video a day? (Score:2)
If you are shooting and uploading a wedding video every day, which implies that you probably do that for a living, then I would assume you can afford a professional connection to go along with the professional components of the trade. If you are uploading a wedding video a week, at normal speeds, then there is not issue.
For those us with regular c
ISP NOT telco (Score:2)
What is actually important is that most ISPs have already started to experiment with traffic control, but they don't tell you what their policies are (e.g. what limit they use, what
Re: (Score:2)
you're missing the point.
it's 900GB per month!
granted, they probably have only a tenth of the subscribers that comcast has.
That still begs the question, why aren't ISPs and telcos and network owners investing in infrastructure? Are profits so precious that they can't invest in their future?
Life is great (Score:5, Interesting)
I hope this new cap does not pose any problems for me. I have 60mbit down / 20mbit up.. I live near Tokyo, Japan. The entire country has fibre up the ass here for the most part (I've heard about 80%) and this stems from a totally different corporate culture here. It is starting to change and become more weestern (god help them), but generally in Japan the company you work for takes care of you a lot more and for a lot longer, and as a CEO you would stay with the same company for probably the rest of your career a lot more often. Because of this, the long-term success of a company is treated as being much more important than the short term profit / how the stocks perform this quarter. As such, Japanese companies are more willing to invest HUGE sums of money up front in R&D and infrastructure that wont make them any money for years and sometimes decades (Look at Tokyo's public transit/subway/monorail system, I've heard that it wont cover the debts it made to be built for another decade or two still, and they're still building new subway lines). This difference in corporate thinking is what has put the Japanese at the forefront in terms of technology applied to everyday living. Going back home to the US feels like walking into a technologically primative country, and not because the Japanese have any great marvels of technology, they simply spend more money on finding applicable ways to have technology contribute to everyday life.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Blu-Ray (Score:3, Funny)
Time Warner's highest level tier for their experiment with usage-based pricing is 40 GB/month. This is less than the capacity of a single Blu-Ray disc. Sony must be doing a happy dance.
Re:Seriously? (Score:5, Funny)
Note to all future submitters and to the editors.
From now on, please add *lt;SARCASM> tags for the sarcasm-impaired.
Thank you.
Re:Seriously? (Score:5, Funny)
Catching the subtleties isn't really your thing, huh?
Personally, if I have to live with the connectivity options in the US for actually being able to see genitals in my porn, I'll consider it a fair trade.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Whatching? Is that some fiendish portmanteau of whacking and watching? You Japanese porn fans are weird in so very many ways...
Re: (Score:2)
I agree, 900GB of upload is just huge for a residential account, you're more than just running a personal server at that point.
might be someting else (Score:2, Interesting)
Could the ISPs be telling the content providers to go jump in the lake?
Re:might be someting else (Score:5, Informative)
I live in Japan, and recently my ISP told me specifically in a letter that they absolutely didn't track what I did and also didn't care - not to mention that there's a 20-year-old Japanese law that specifically bans spying on customers' communications that may actually cover this.
They did request that I try not to get caught doing anything illegal, though. They said the worst that could happen is that they would cancel my contract and I would be forced to go sign up with a different fiber internet provider (there are at least two others in Osaka).
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:might be someting else (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:might be someting else (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Seriously? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Notice that the limit is 30GB PER DAY, making it 900GB per month UPLOAD limit.
There is no download limit, as mentioned in article and summary.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Seriously? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
Caps Are Pagan?
Cabbage And Peanuts?
Carpets Around Packages?
I can't figure out what this CAP acronym is... anyone have any ideas?
Re:Seriously? (Score:5, Funny)
I can't figure out what this CAP acronym is... anyone have any ideas?
CAP is a recursive acronym for "CAP Acronym? Please!". Hope that has enlightened you :)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I'd guess that he uses either satalite or cellular.
Re:Seriously? (Score:5, Informative)
Australia. Debateably not a third-world backwater.
(Almost) All residential DSL/Cable data services in Australia have a cap. If you are daft enough to use the defacto monopoly provider's retail services then you get a small cap, high price, and both in- and outbound data count. Until recently, their cap was 1 or 3 GB with a ridiculous per MB charge for excess...they still sell grandma and grandpa (read sucker) accounts with 200 or 400 megabyte limits. I think haemorrhaging customers to the competition, and being forced to play nice by the ACCC, is starting to change their ways.
Bigpond's offerings [nyud.net]
Most everyone else counts only inbound traffic.
Re:Seriously? (Score:5, Funny)
I moved from Australia to Sweden last year.
Me: "What's my bandwidth cap?"
Swedish ISP Tech Support Guy: "What's a 'bandwidth cap'?"
Me: :)
Re:Seriously? (Score:4, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Having a known cap is better than having an unknown cap. Having a cap measured in the hundreds of megabytes per month is utter bullshit regardless of whether you know the number or not. Hell, I'll often download five gigs in a day when screwing around with a linux distro or something. With an automated system-wide backup service (Mozy) and a camera that takes 14MB shots at 6.5FPS I'll often saturate my upload for a day or two at a time getting things synced up (even a reasonably respectable 1Mbit upload
If only there were a way (Score:3, Interesting)
To provide service to the broadband neglected in the US -- like, for example, allowing the public power districts that already have wires running to the homes do it.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
You misunderstood me. I agree that broadband over powerline is dumb. Fiber is the way to go, and some PUDs are deploying it [gcpud.org]. Their customers get these awesome Taiwan broadband levels for about $50/month. Fiber does not have an RF signature.
Slashdot users not so good at math? (Score:5, Interesting)
If you run the math on the 100/100 Mbit (Japanese) connections in question, these caps are equal to only 3% of a user's upload 24/7. In Comcast's area, that would be 324 MB a day for 6/1 service, or 9.7 GB a month.
These caps are much, much worse for the service offered than Comcast's rumored 250 GB cap or the actual 400+ GB cap they currently use to remove excessive users from their network today.
Re:Slashdot users not so good at math? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Ummm, no. Text in Japanese is usually done as either Shift-JIS or EUC and occasionally as Unicode. 2-3 bytes per character. Graphics are used about as much as on English web pages.
Re:First Post (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Download caps (Score:5, Funny)
900G a month should be enough for everyone.
Re:Download caps (Score:5, Informative)
To hit the 900GB limit you'd have to upload at (if I did the math right) 364KB/sec nonstop every day for an entire month.
I don't know what the hell you're doing but that's a pretty generous cap, and something a typical family is unlikely to reach... even uploading 30GB HD home movies.
=Smidge=
Re: (Score:2)
How about off-site, real-time backups for a small law firm? I pay $200.00/mo for 1.5meg up and down with no caps. Amazon's Jungle Disk might be worthwhile if I could manage 5 terabytes or so....a month.
Anybody else know what a video deposition looks like? 8-10 hours of .mov files spanning multiple DVDs. One person's depo can generate that 8-10 gig of data and the average case has 12 depos.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Right, which small law firm is that which produces 5TB of new or changed data *a month*? I am responsible for backup and storage at a large life sciences department at a UK university, and we don't produce 5TB of data from our microscopes a month. These produce data at a much higher rate than a small law firm could reasonably manage.
You need to invest in some better backup technology me thinks. Something that backs up files rather than filesystems.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Download caps (Score:4, Interesting)
I've produced 16 people for deposition in one month. All were plaintiffs in a Reduction In Force / Older Worker's Benefit Protection Act suit. Just last month (June) I had four depositions lasting longer than 8 hours. (FWIW I have a Masters in Endocrine Physiology (Masters only program) and I do understand lab data output though I was working on a PDP 11 when I took that Master's Degree).
IF what we were considering here was a reasonable path to off-site backups/disaster planning/remote access at high bandwidth - I could easily see how only 3-6 attorneys engaged in moderate litigation could generate 5T/mo.
What do bandwidth caps portend for small business - you don't have to be an attorney to create media - consider advertising firms, contractors, real estate - all could easily top the cap without being able to plan ahead. Market forces drive the demand. If you just created the Tesla vehicle and gas went to $20.00/gal - you had better have the bandwidth and data to feed your potential customers what they want.
Re: (Score:2)
Not so hard when your connection is 1GB...
But think infected machines running DDOS nodes!
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
If you give people the bandwidth they will find a way to use it. Hell, a professional photographer backing up his daily photo shoots could hit 30Gigs without much problem. Or cinematographers collaborating over the internet. Not everyone just surfs message boards and downloads an ISO once a month so that they can consider themselves a 'power user'.
I say open up the hardware and the software will follow.
Re:Download caps (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
640k should be enough for 1.87 seconds.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
How many people have substantially more than 3 Mbps of upstream bandwidth to play with at home? I'm on my service provider's fastest available connection [cox.com], and upstream bandwidth maxes out at 1 Mbps.
Re: (Score:2)
Well, they have very fast local connections over there...
So you're more likely to put the files locally, than upload them to a server. This would be common for something like a wedding video, or local events etc...
It's not a single 30gb video, but rather 30 downloads of a 1gb video perhaps.
Re:Download caps (Score:5, Funny)
And what about wedding night movies?
Re: (Score:2)
Oh yeah? I'm stuck using an RFC1149 connection. Let me tell you, path MTU discovery is a pain over that thing...
For you young folks... that was funny. (Score:3, Funny)
There was a time there when the Mars lander had faster network speeds than I had in my house in a populous region of the USA. Nobody was willing to bring cable or DSL to our town, but the damn lander had a 256K connection.
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah. And of course, because I can now watch CNN in HD, I have absolutely no desire to read or watch any news at all online.
Just settle down, a bit, ok?
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah. And of course, because I can now watch CNN in HD, I have absolutely no desire to read or watch any news at all online.
Why would you want to watch *news* when you can be *entertained* by watching CNN - now in HD!
News is so depressing.
Re: (Score:2)
Why would you want to watch *news* when you can be *entertained* by watching CNN - now in HD! News is so depressing.
Pretty simple, you answered your own question there. Not only is news depressing, it is also boring. That is why younger people are watching it less and less. [slashdot.org] I think you will agree, it is a good thing that more and more people are getting their news from the internet. Now hopefully they are getting it from a variety of sources, instead of just one favorite news site.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
And I agree completely with every one of the points you just made, but none of this has anything to do with HD - except in so far as HD can be used for more effective mind-numbing propaganda. But that's as bad as blaming the gun instead of the guy who pulled the trigger.
The HD switchover has nothing to do with the Internet, unless you are really worried that HD will kill the free press online. Sorry, but you are making some very bizarre connections here.
I ask you again - how does the HD switchover, in any w
Re:PLANNED: February 2009 HD laws in the US (Score:5, Informative)
what HD? they're moving to SD transmitted digitally.
Re: (Score:2)
honestly, while the transition to all digital broadcast (which happens to involve HD) is being used to cram DRM down our throats and sell out our fair use rights, I'm not drawing the connections you are.
HD streams have been around on the web for a while, and are now common on pirate sites as well.
Nobody is forcing alternative viewpoints to be in HD. slashdot isn't even in SD and I don't see it going anywhere.
The imposition of caps of the type theyre "experimenting" with in the US are most definitely a step
Correction.. (Score:2)
I misred the story.. thats 40 gigs in a day
honestly, if you go through 40 gigs UPLOAD in a day, you've had enough for that day.
Re: (Score:2)
QAM has requirements for HDCP, end-to-end encryption, and selective output control because our fine FCC decided to defer to the "free market", and by "free market" they mean the monopoly content providers saying "you design your hardware this way"
Benefit of HD News? (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
"Of course, it always helps when you completely rebuild your infrastructure after it being decimated after a war."
Decimation is the loss of ten percent. It is tolerable casualties for a military unit, let alone infrastructure.
Japan was far more devastated, giving it nearly a blank slate on which to rebuild.
http://www.anesi.com/ussbs01.htm#eeoaaatj [anesi.com]
Re: (Score:2)
Decimation is a loss of 10% when dealing with soldiers. Otherwise it has several other meanings. At this point the use of the word to mean what the GP said is the predominating definition and will be the definition in the future.
http://encarta.msn.com/dictionary_1861603101/decimate.html [msn.com]
Not the best source, but I was too lazy to look for something better. Definition 2 would be the most common use of the word.
Re:Japan VS. US Infrastructure. (Score:5, Insightful)
I have my doubts that they were laying fiber after WWII.
Well when did it get layed then? (Score:5, Funny)
Before? :)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
So what's the excuse again? That we simply suck when it comes to doing things the right way?
I don't know what your excuse is, but the reason is due to crappy regulation that's resulted in monopolies that aren't serving the public interest. When the infrastructure provider is necessarily the same as the service provider, you have a problem (since the infrastructure is inherently a monopoly; nobody's fond of lots of streets being dug up to put in new capacity). There used to be exactly the same problem in the UK; the regulator here was very close to BT (who had the market sewn up just as thoroughly
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)